| Beyond discussing various manifestations of the rich religious life in Roman Dacia, the purpose of the present study is to reconstruct, to the extent that this is possible, the diverse types of individual and collective identities, consistently negotiated by Dacian provincials. I start from the premise that, the very fluidity of concepts of "religion" in the Roman world allows it to infiltrate, and at the same time to provide a "stage" for, the outward expression of a variety of other facets of the identity of an individual and that of his or her community, be they cultural, social, economic or political. Understood in this context, the evidence from religion in Roman Dacia functions as the starting point in exploring the ways in which the people of this province negotiated these diverse identity constructs---professional and personal, public and private, individual and collective, civilian and military, male and female, Roman and non-Roman---within the larger context of a new frontier province, and within that of the Roman Empire, in general.;As part of my examination of the religious life of the Dacian province, I have conducted a corpus study of artifacts from all across Roman Dacia. These artifacts mention and/or represent nearly 2,200 instances of over 160 individual deities (including deified abstractions), falling into roughly 25 origin groups. As such, the material gathered in the corpus could be seen to provide a "representative sample" of the religious culture of the Dacian province. The task of undertaking a more rigorously empirical study on the religious life of Roman Dacia is an imperative realized by the present dissertation and its reliance on corpus analysis. Such an empirical approach allows for a more accurate and nuanced interpretation of a large, comprehensive data set, illustrating patterns, trends, characteristics of, and even motivations for, "religious behavior," that would otherwise be more difficult to detect. |
